


a ghost story

by theputterer



Series: assorted nonsense timestamps [4]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Childhood, Childhood Trauma, Estrangement, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Memories, coming to terms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-17
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2019-05-24 14:54:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14956766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theputterer/pseuds/theputterer
Summary: He looked at Fima. “The shadow; the man. What did he look like?”Fima swallowed, and Cassian did not like the way his son was looking at him, with something akin to wariness, something close to fear.“Like you.”[Or: a ghost story about fathers, sons, and the trauma of abandonment.]





	a ghost story

**Author's Note:**

> This story is compliant with my cassian andor nonsense series. I believe it still stands on its own.

He opened his eyes.

The chronometer said it was three in the morning. No visible light could be seen from behind the closed curtains, and it was entirely silent, no speeders or pedestrians walking past the house, making their way further into the city for the new work day. Next to him, Jyn snored.

For someone who had always had a restless sleep, for someone whose melancholia worsened his sleep; Cassian waking up for no apparent reason in the middle of the night was not unusual. It had happened thousands of times, and would for many more.

What was odd was this feeling Cassian was wrestling with, this prickly feeling that a voice had just said his name, that he had woken up because someone had called for him. He lay still, and listened, but the silence of the house seemed to only deepen.

Yet the heaviness remained, electric, something like static.

And then Fima came running into the room, brown eyes wide, hair mussed, and Cassian sat up, relief flowing through him, certain that his son had called for him, and woken him up.

And then he took in the fear on Fima’s face, and his heart stopped.

“What is it?”

Fima took a deep breath. “There’s a shadow standing outside my room.”

“... What?”

At this, Jyn woke up. She stared.

Fima’s hands were tightened into fists. “I woke up, and I looked out my window, and I saw a man’s shadow. Make him go away.”

Fima’s voice was trembling, tears gathering at the corners of his eyes, and so Cassian went into his room, to find this shadow hovering outside.

Nothing was there.

The night was still and dark, illuminated only by the lamp in Fima’s room and the fresh snow covering the backyard, leading to the frostbitten wall of the art museum that Fima’s room faced. The mural was currently painted with purple and blue swirls, a distant ocean facing the endless snow that defined the capital city of Fest.

Cassian stepped close to the window, surveying the snow under it. It was difficult to see, but there was no sign of footprints; the snow was seemingly untouched.

He looked at Fima. “The shadow; the man. What did he look like?”

Fima swallowed, and Cassian did not like the way his son was looking at him, with something akin to wariness, something close to fear.

“Like you.”

 

* * *

 

It began with a series of innocuous incidents.

Cassian walked into the kitchen early one morning, the day after his forty-sixth birthday, to discover the light was still on. He was in the habit of turning the light off before he went to bed, and so the sight of the solitary light illuminating the otherwise dark room, with snow piled heavy on the window outside, was surprising. He stood in the doorway for a moment, staring at the single light, before deciding he must’ve been so tired the night before he’d simply neglected to make sure the light was off before he went to bed.

(He did consult with four-year-old Ersa, who had inherited his insomnia, and was liable to wander the house in the dead of night; she reported that while she had been awake most of the night, she had not ventured out of her room. He believed her.)

A couple days later, Jyn noticed that her hairbrush had mysteriously traveled from her bedside table to the couch in the front room. Again, this misplacement was chalked up to carelessness, as the orphanage was undergoing renovations, meaning Jyn’s workload had doubled, what with keeping an eye on both children and construction, and making sure the two did not interact dangerously. She figured she had simply been in a hurry one morning and deposited her hairbrush in the front room, running out the door.

(She did consult with ten-year-old Fima, who had inherited her hair, and was liable to lose his own things in the chaos of his own room; he claimed that while he had borrowed her brush earlier in the week, he had left it where he’d found it, on her bedside table. She believed him.)

One morning, Ersa was brushing her teeth, the small fresher window opened to the frosty air outside, letting the steam out of the room, when the window abruptly slammed shut. Ersa jumped a foot in the air, and cast a long, worried look at the window. It was heavy, made of thick glass, so as to protect the inside of the house from the lethally frigid storms that plagued Fest. It was not an easy thing to shut, and had never once been forced closed by the wind. And there was not even a slight breeze that morning.

And then, over the next week:

-a mug fell of its own accord off the table and to the floor, shattering.

-the closet door opened itself, revealing only coats and boots.

-a noise, like someone had knocked on the front door, only for Cassian to open it and see no one.

He took note of all of these seemingly unrelated odd events, but found no connection. And while strange, they were all harmless, and not particularly irksome, and so he put them aside.

And then he woke in the middle of the night, and saw his son’s terrified face.

 

* * *

 

Fima refused to sleep in his room for the rest of the night, and Ersa, easily awoken by the commotion and ever so kind, offered up her own bed for Fima to share.

It was a sign of how real Fima’s fear was that he did not complain about sharing a bed with his little sister.

Cassian walked into the backyard to explore further.

The snow was as clean and undisturbed as it had looked from inside the house. He walked slowly through it, listening to the ice that cracked under his boots, achingly loud in the silence of the neighborhood. He stilled in the snow, and listened for anyone walking nearby. His ears rang with the quiet.

The prickly feeling that there was someone calling for him amidst the silence was still eating at his mind.

 _I’m here,_ he thought. _Show yourself._

He stood in the dark, and waited.

“Cass?”

Jyn stood in the doorway, frowning at him. Her hair was mussed, skin turning rosy in response to the cold. She kept her arms wrapped tightly around herself, though her right hand held a flashlight, the beam of which was currently pointed at Cassian.

“Anything?” she asked.

He turned, and walked back towards her.

“No,” he murmured. “Nothing.”

“Must’ve been a nightmare,” she said.

But Cassian shook his head.

“I don’t think it was.”

He looked up, at the gray, cloud-covered sky. The storm that had begun around midnight had cleared up a bit, the gray lightening a shade or two, but still ever-present and unavoidable. It was something Cassian had always found comfort in, and he clung to the feeling, even as the gray seemed to heighten, rippling with a new energy, a new presence.

He looked back at Jyn, taking in her questioning frown.

“I think,” he said, “We may have a ghost.”

 

* * *

 

Cassian and Jyn were both spiritual people. It was impossible not to be, when you survived again and again, against all odds; when the universe seemed to go out of its way to upend and correct and upend and correct, over and over again.

Cassian’s spirituality was a thing borne out of grief, out of wistfulness and greed. A wish to be close to people even when they were gone, a dream of returning home, a desire to be forgiven in the end. His belief in an afterlife was perhaps his longest, most closely held belief.

But interacting with a ghost; that was new.

“What’s the deal with ghosts around here?” Jyn asked, over breakfast the next day. “What does it want?”

“I’m not sure he wants anything,” Cassian replied.

“He?”

Cassian shrugged. “Fima said the shadow was a man.”

More specifically, Fima had said the shadow-man looked like Cassian.

“He was as tall as you,” Fima had told him, before he’d left for school after a largely sleepless night. “And his hair was short, like yours. He was looking right at me.”

Fima had called him a shadow, because he’d looked like one. A tall, black shadow, with no discernable facial features save the hair around its silhouette, standing up straight, with no sun to explain its appearance.

“Okay,” Jyn said, stirring her coffee aimlessly. “So… Why is _he_ here?”

“Not sure yet,” Cassian murmured. “But he knows me.”

“He knows you,” Jyn repeated.

He nodded. “The shadow, it… I felt something. A… a presence. That is why I know it’s a ghost.”

Cassian had a long history of trusted instincts, and so Jyn did not vocally lay doubt to this, though her pursed lips suggested she was not totally convinced. She thought it over, watching Cassian pick at his porridge.

“It’s not Zeferino, is it?” she finally asked.

That had been Cassian’s immediate thought, an immediate fear. That the brother he’d murdered over a quarter of a century earlier had returned to extract his revenge, now, when Cassian finally felt peaceful and understood. Zeferino had been a ruthless, cunning man who had haunted Cassian’s teenaged life; it stood to reason his ghost would behave similarly.

But there was one thing to dispute the ghost being Zeferino.

“He wasn’t… Cold, like Zeferino was,” Cassian said.

Zeferino had been light, like Jyn and Nerezza, but while Jyn was as luminous as a star and Nerezza as bright as an inferno, Zeferino had been a cold, brilliant, chemical flame. The feeling was discernible, and it did not explain the heavy static.

A bolt of blinding electricity.

“Okay,” Jyn said. “Then who is it?”

But there was only one other dead man who had known Cassian, who shared his height, and his hair, and his profile. Only one other dead man, buried in tattered pieces in a tundra on the outskirts of Fulcra. Only one other dead man, so quick and dazzling, a shot of electricity, here and gone in the blink of a child’s eye.

Only one other dead man who had haunted Cassian’s life for almost longer than he could remember.

“I think it’s Gabriel,” Cassian said, as this was easier than saying, _It’s my father._

 

* * *

 

He had no pictures of Gabriel, no pictures of Zeferino, and this was not due to a lack of trying, but due to a lack of interest. These were two ghosts Cassian did not feel like communing with, two ghosts he did not feel like he owed anything to. This was in stark contrast to Serafima and Nerezza, a most beloved mother and an adored sister, two losses Cassian had carried for decades and would never fully recover from.

Gabriel was a whole other force.

Cassian had long reconciled himself with the simple fact he would never come to understand his father’s reasons and motives. He would never come to understand his father’s choice to leave his family to run a crusade, to abandon his children for his cause. The older Cassian got, the more inexcusable it became.

His bitterness frosted his bones, and he lived with it.

He stood in the front room, and looked at the photo of teenaged Serafima on the fireplace mantle, and remembered his anger at his father, the anger he had cultivated as a young child, when Gabriel moved out of the house, separating from the wife who had only ever wanted him to stay.

It was a fate Cassian had nearly inherited, until he chose to change it.

He stood alone in front of the fireplace, and felt goosebumps erupt on the back of his neck.

The air thickened, petrichor, the smell of a dry thunderstorm rolling in.

“You never came back,” Cassian whispered. “Why are you here now?”

He turned around, but there was no one there.

He had not expected there to be.

 

* * *

 

“Mama said you think the shadow is your papa.”

Fima’s voice was calm, matter of fact, and Cassian thought that perhaps he and Jyn should have come up with a plan on how to deal with the shadow, including on what to say to their children.

“I do,” Cassian said. “How does that make you feel?”

Fima shrugged. “Not as scared, I guess.”

He understood then why Jyn had told Fima.

“Good,” Cassian said. “I’m glad.”

“You never talk about him.”

“I don’t.”

Fima waited, his frown deepening when his father did not move to offer an explanation. Cassian studied the dishes in the sink. He wondered if Fima could feel the weight in the space of the doorway, turning the air static.

This question was answered by Ersa, puttering out of her room, and abruptly freezing before she could enter the kitchen.

Ersa had always been too much like Cassian, and so he was unsurprised at this development.

“Fima,” Ersa said. “The shadow is here.”

“It’s grandpa,” Fima said, similarly unsurprised that Ersa could feel the ghost.

Ersa’s face brightened. _“Really?_ Mama--”

“Other grandpa,” Fima said.

Ersa’s face fell. “Oh?”

“Papa doesn’t want to talk about him. We shouldn’t ask.”

Fima had always been too much like Jyn, and so Cassian was unsurprised that Fima should pick up his moods so easily.

But Ersa looked at Cassian, and did not hesitate to ask the unspoken question: “Is he… Bad?”

Cassian sighed, and the prickling amplified, nearly taking his breath away.

“No,” he murmured. “He wasn’t… bad.”

His children believed him, even as the doubt gnawed at Cassian.

If there was one thing Gabriel had given to him, it was doubt.

 

* * *

 

“I can’t find my green scarf.”

“You have other scarves.”

Jyn shot him a dirty look. “That isn’t the point.”

He knew it wasn’t.

“I’ll help if I can,” Jyn said. “But Gabriel is not my problem.”

He knew that, too.

Gabriel, whatever else he may have been; he had always been Cassian’s problem.

 

* * *

 

The morning after the whole house was woken by an inexplicable _bang,_ like something heavy had landed on the roof, yet nothing had been found, saw Cassian going into Travia Chan’s office unannounced.

He did not need an appointment to see the Prime Minister, as he was a member of her administration, but he usually gave Travia a head’s up for when he needed to meet with her about something, and so she let him in with a questioning frown.

“What is it?” Travia asked. “It’d better not be those damned Mantooian woolmakers.”

The trade squabble with the woolmakers had been resolved two weeks earlier. Cassian remembered he had not told Travia about this resolution yet.

“No, that’s done,” he said. “But, I… I wanted to ask you about Gabriel.”

“Gabriel?”

“Andor.”

He did not blame Travia for not immediately understanding which Gabriel he was referring to. Gabriel was a fairly common name on Fest, and Cassian had never once asked her about his father before, despite having known for twenty years that she had known Gabriel herself.

“Of course,” Travia said, and the normally no-nonsense Icewoman seemed to melt, becoming more obviously maternal than Cassian was used to. The effect was almost enough to make him leave the room entirely. He wondered if she’d only been waiting for him to ask. “What would you like to know?”

Cassian considered demurring, of saying he’d simply been wondering, but he expected that would not give him the answer he was looking for, and that he ought to not belittle his long relationship with Travia by being dishonest.

“He’s haunting me,” he said flatly, and Travia blinked. “And I need him to go.”

Unlike Jyn, Travia, a native and lifelong Festian, did not need to ask anything more.

“I see,” she said. “You’re asking because you don’t know why he’s here.”

“He was never _here_ when he was alive,” Cassian said, and the bitterness in his voice was acid on his tongue. “I don’t understand what’s woken him up now. I don’t want him here.”

_I don’t want him here._

It was, perhaps, the first time Cassian had ever wished this.

“Ghosts that have been resting for forty years do not suddenly return with no reason,” Travia noted, as if Cassian was not aware of this already. “Something’s woken him up. Once you figure it out… He should move on.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

Cassian had never known Gabriel’s family, and what records that may have existed of them had almost certainly been destroyed in the calamitous war against the Empire that had been waged in part on Fest, where the Empire had believed the most debilitating losses were the ones of history. Cassian was certain that the Andors had always been small, and separate; and for the first time, he considered if maybe Gabriel had learned the art of abandoning a family from his own father, and his father before him.

It was not a legacy Cassian had any plans to continue.

“There’s a man,” Travia said, slowly. “Itzal Mas. He’s retired, but he volunteers with a government-run shelter for war veterans downtown. He lives on the outskirts of Fulcra.”

“Okay.”

“I believe he knew your father.”

“Itzal Mas,” Cassian repeated, and Travia nodded. He turned to leave, and her voice followed him and the static:

“Don’t leave that ghost in my office, Andor.”

 

* * *

 

“How long will you be gone?”

Ersa did not look at him as she asked her question, idly folding paper before her, practicing a new, exotic kind of art she was learning at her school. Watching Ersa and Fima engage in art was a bittersweet experience for Cassian; their hands, however small, became Serafima’s then.

“Not long,” he said. “I’m only going to the other side of the city. Not Mantooine.”

“You’re taking grandpa with you?”

Cassian sighed.

“He’s not really… _him,_ Ersa,” he said, slowly. “I don’t… Please don’t get attached.”

“Mama thinks you’re scared of him.”

The words came from Fima, who had appeared from his room down the hall. From the confident statement to his wavy, shoulder-length hair, he reminded Cassian of Jyn so much it made him want to laugh.

“Do you think I’m scared of him?” Cassian asked Fima, rather than ask when Jyn had said he was scared.

Fima looked down. “I think he upsets you.”

Cassian liked to think he was good at masking his assorted mental health issues from his children, until little comments and movements from them told him otherwise. Fima’s downcast eyes and quiet words stabbed him like blades to the gut.

“Come here,” he murmured.

Fima walked hurriedly to him, not hesitating to wrap his arms around Cassian’s middle in a tight hug. Cassian brushed his hands through Fima’s thick hair, and pressed a kiss to his head.

“It’s never your fault when I am sad,” he whispered.

It was one of his most paramount fears, this fear his children would blame themselves for his inherent, inescapable melancholia. The fear his children would inherit it from him, that they would lose their light.

(He glanced at Ersa and knew it was too late for one of them.)

But Fima nodded, and added, “But the shadow makes you sadder.”

“Yes,” Cassian agreed. “But that is not your problem to fix.”

Gabriel was Cassian’s problem.

As was his sorrow.

Two burdens he refused to let his children carry.

“I’m taking the ghost with me,” he said to both Fima and Ersa, “And I will not bring him back. Okay?”

Fima nodded again, while Ersa stood, holding her palm up to Cassian. He picked up the item in it.

A small, awkwardly folded paper gray bird looked up at him.

“Thank you, Ersa,” he said, quietly.

He left the house, with Fima nervously eyeing him, searching for the shadow that had stood outside his room. Ersa leaned out the open door, and waved first to Cassian, and then to the empty air around him.

“Bye, ghost!”

 

* * *

 

Itzal Mas lived on the outskirts of the industrial district, a poor, unusually barren and empty place by Fulcra’s standards. The streets were covered in black ice, and the snow was a grossly dark shade of gray. Little ashy snowflakes fell as Cassian walked down a particularly miserable section of block, scanning the rundown buildings for the address Travia had given to him.

The house was thin, and close to decrepit, and it was with skepticism and anxiety that Cassian walked to the front door, and knocked.

The static buzzed in his ears.

The man who opened the door looked just as decrepit as the house. He was old, quite old, with wispy white hair and a face more lined than smooth. One of his eyes was glossy, clearly sightless, but the other was undeniably alert, and it was this eye that zeroed in on Cassian.

“Yes?” he said.

“I’m looking for Itzal Mas,” Cassian said.

“That’s me,” the man said. “Or what’s left of him. Who are you?”

“I’m, um… My name is Cassian. I knew Gabriel Andor.”

A small smile grew on the man’s face, as subtle as a Festian sunrise.

“Come in, Cassian.”

 

* * *

 

Itzal insisted on making a full pot of tea, and refused Cassian’s repeated offers of help, waiting until he was sitting nervously at the rickety kitchen table before putting the kettle on.

“You’re older than the usual crowd,” Itzal said as he worked.

“... I’m sorry?”

“You aren’t the first to be here asking about Gabriel Andor,” Itzal said, back turned so he missed the shock on Cassian’s face. “I get university age kids around here, sometimes. Referred over to me from archivists with the government. History students. Looking to interview for their oral history on Fulcra.”

“They ask about Gabriel?”

Itzal paused to look at him. “You know Gabriel started the rebel group in Fulcra that grew to become the Fest Rebellion.”

It was something Cassian was very familiar with, more so than almost anything else about Gabriel.

“How did you know him?” Cassian asked. “Were you also part of his rebellion?”

“No,” Itzal said. “We were friends, but we grew apart when Gabriel got involved in the rebellion. I left Fest to go to university outside of the sector. By the time I came home…”

He trailed off.

The shadow flickered at the corner of Cassian’s eye.

Itzal carried two mugs of tea to the table, and sat in the chair across from Cassian.

“What do you want to know about your father, Cassian?”

“I don’t know, I--”

Cassian stopped, as the significance of Itzal’s words sank in. The older man’s one good eye twinkled.

“Unusual name you’ve got,” Itzal said. “Only ever heard of one baby with it.”

“You knew both my parents.”

Itzal nodded. “Briefly. Gabriel and I went to school together, stayed in touch for a while… But I met Serafima, once or twice, and their kids. You were… Hell, you couldn’t have been three years old when I left Fest.” Itzal winked. “I’m not offended you don’t remember me.”

Somehow, the revelation that Itzal had known both Gabriel _and_ Serafima was shocking. In retrospect, it was of course a possibility; Cassian realized he sometimes forgot that while he could only remember Gabriel and Serafima as separate, that they had been together for at least a decade before they did split up.

“I’m not sure what I want to know,” Cassian admitted.

“Probably how to get his ghost to back off,” Itzal noted, sipping his tea.

“You feel him?”

“Course. Gabriel always had a real _presence,_ you know?”

“Yes,” Cassian agreed.

Gabriel had been a born leader; charismatic, charming, funny, oratorial. These were all traits Cassian had inherited, employed at specifically chosen times and events to maximize the chances of success. Speech-making and leadership were not his most comfortable of roles, but he knew it was largely thanks to Gabriel that he could even do them at all.

“How old are you now, Cassian?”

“I’m forty-six,” Cassian said. “My birthday was a couple weeks ago.”

“Oh, that’s interesting.”

“Why?”

Itzal smiled. “Forgot you might not know. Well, if my math’s right--and it may not be, knowing this damned brain of mine--Gabriel was your age when you were born.”

“... Oh.”

Cassian remembered the morning when he’d noticed the kitchen light being left on had been the morning after his birthday. That morning had signaled the start of the haunting; and yet the fact his birthday immediately preceded it had escaped his attention as being potentially significant. In retrospect, it was stupidly obvious.

“Got any kids, Cassian?” Itzal asked.

“Two,” Cassian said, glad for the distraction. “My son is ten, and my daughter is four.”

“You close to them?”

The humor in Itzal’s face had disappeared. He looked as old as he had when he opened the front door.

Cassian met his gaze unflinchingly.

“Yes,” he said.

Itzal nodded.

“Good,” he said. “That’s good.”

“Gabriel left us. Did you know that?”

“Not immediately,” Itzal said. “Like I said; we drifted apart when I left Fest. And then I heard he was dead, and… I was never close to Serafima, I’m afraid. To be frank, she scared me. An intimidating woman, your mother. Beautiful, but… A little terrifying.”

“Yes.”

“But Gabriel loved her, and it never…” Itzal sighed. “I didn’t realize how radical he was. To leave her, and you kids. Just tragic.”

“He chose it.”

Itzal’s face was drawn, and he was clearly sorry, so sorry, and the bitterness turned Cassian’s vision red, but he wasn’t bitter or angry at this old man, and he reminded himself as much.

“I’m sorry, Cassian,” Itzal said.

Above their heads, the light went out.

Both men looked up at it, but the bulb was intact, seemingly undisturbed. The switch on the wall was still pointed in the on position. Itzal and Cassian looked at each other.

“Ah,” Itzal said.

Cassian looked down at the table.

The hair on the back of his neck stood up.

“I can’t give you what you need to hear,” Cassian whispered. “I can’t do it. I’m… I’m not a forgiving person. Maybe when I was a child I was, when you knew me, but I… I am not that child anymore. So if you’re looking for those words, for that forgiveness… You won’t find it here.” He swallowed. “Please. Don’t ask anything more of me than you already have.”

 

* * *

 

_“I believe in freedom, Cassian,” says Gabriel. “I believe in my family, and my friends, and my neighbors. I want a good, free, life for us all. That is why I fight. That is what I am fighting for. Do you understand? What do you think about that?”_

_“I want it,” says Cassian, and even at six years old, he does. He understands that much, wants that much, that sketched out dream of a peaceful life._

_His father hugs him tightly, pushes his hair from his eyes, presses a kiss to his forehead._

_“I hope you will forgive me for all this, one day,” says Gabriel._

_“For what, Papa?” Cassian asks, but Gabriel doesn’t answer. He only shakes his head, smiling at his youngest son._

_“Most beloved boy,” says Gabriel. “Be kind. Be good.”_

 

* * *

 

Forty years later, Cassian sat at Itzal Mas’s kitchen table, and spoke to his father’s ghost.

“It is your turn,” he whispered. “To be kind to me. Please be kind to me. Please forgive me, for being unable to forgive you.”

He glanced at the wall, at the faded shape, the shadow, and it was a most familiar shadow.

It was the shadow he saw every day, with each step he took.

The myriad ways we are forced to become our fathers. How inescapable it can be for sons.

“I’m learning from your mistakes,” he said. “Please let that be enough. Please don’t ask more of me. I’ve moved on, and you need to, as well. I don’t… I don’t need you. I used to, but I don’t anymore, and I…”

The light above him flickered on.

And then off again.

And then on and off, rapidly, almost violently.

“I _can’t_ forgive you,” Cassian snapped, and his bitterness returned, and Itzal watched in silence, and Cassian almost wanted Gabriel to appear if only so Cassian could yell right in his face for this, for all of it, for his abandonment, for his death, for his mystery. “I can’t forgive you, I _can’t._ No matter what you think--”

The lights stopped flickering.

_No matter what you think._

And at last, Cassian realized what Gabriel had come back for.

What there was left to say.

Why he might have come across Fima, and stood outside his window, watching over the little boy.

Why he lingered close in the house, why he followed Cassian around.

Why Cassian’s forty-sixth birthday woke him up.

Why Itzal’s words turned the light off.

“Oh,” Cassian whispered.

In a way, Gabriel’s haunting was about Cassian.

But it was also about Gabriel.

And wasn’t that just the perfect encapsulation of Gabriel Andor. Everything, and nothing.

“Okay,” Cassian said. “I hear you. I understand.” He paused, and added, “Thank you for telling me.”

The light flashed.

“Goodbye,” Cassian whispered.

The light turned off.

The shadow faded away.

The static disappeared.

Itzal and Cassian sat in the dark.

 

* * *

 

“Thank you, for your help.”

“Not sure I did anything,” Itzal replied, but he still looked pleased. He watched as Cassian pulled his coat back on.

“Goodbye,” Cassian murmured, and could think of nothing more to say.

He was halfway down the path in front of the house when Itzal called out to him.

“I’m glad Serafima came around to it.”

Cassian paused, his interest once again piqued. “Came around to what?”

“Your name,” Itzal said. _“Cassian._ I told you, it’s unusual. It was Gabriel’s idea to name the new baby after her, to give it some version of her surname. _Cassiana_ for a girl, _Cassian_ for a boy. Serafima wasn’t sure she liked the idea. But Gabriel was a big proponent of it. Used to tell me that if his kids knew anything about him, it was that he admired their mother very much.”

Cassian stood on the black ice-covered path.

The air was no longer heavy, the static evaporated, but he knew the warmth in his chest had not originated from him. It was that special kind of warmth you felt when someone you loved did something that reminded you of why you loved them in the first place.

(Four years earlier, Cassian, inspired by the suggestion from Fima, had launched a campaign to convince Jyn that naming their daughter after her was a good idea. Four years earlier, the girl was born, and given a bastardization of her mother’s surname, as her father had been given.)

“Thank you,” Cassian said.

Both he and Itzal knew it was not really Itzal to whom Cassian was speaking.

 

* * *

 

It was late when Cassian got home, but not too late, and so he looked into Fima’s room before going to his own.

Fima was still awake, reading a comic. He smiled when he saw Cassian.

“Is the shadow gone?” he asked.

“He is.”

Cassian walked into the room, and sat on the edge of Fima’s bed. Fima sat up to face him.

“My father left my family when I was Ersa’s age,” Cassian said, and Fima’s eyes widened. “And he died when I was six. I never got to know him. He’s been gone a very long time, but I… I am still angry, and sad, about what happened. Part of me will always miss him, and wish he would come back.”

“Is that why the shadow came?”

“I believe he saw you, and thought you were me. Time passes differently for other beings.”

Fima nodded.

“But I do not need him back,” Cassian continued. “And he knows that, now. He’ll move on, and leave us alone.”

“But you won’t.”

“What?”

Fima’s face was so open and honest it made Cassian ache. Here was a ten-year-old child, who had always been far more of a child than Cassian had ever gotten to be.

If only one of them got a warm, loving childhood; it _had_ to be Fima.

“You won’t leave me,” Fima said. “You’re going to stay.”

There was absolute confidence in Fima’s voice.

No room for doubt.

The doubt that forever separated Gabriel and Cassian was an abyss; it could not even breathe between Cassian and Fima.

“Yes, Fima,” Cassian said. “I’ll never leave you. I’ll stay.”

And Fima nodded, too innocent to truly understand how significant such a promise could be.

He laid back down, tunneling under his blankets, and turned his head up to look at the window. Snow was once again falling on the other side of the glass.

“The ghost scared me,” Fima said. “But he looked like you. So I knew he wasn’t really bad.”

Cassian couldn’t help but laugh.

“Maybe he could visit,” Fima decided.

Cassian reached out and brushed Fima’s wavy hair off his face, this second Andor named after Serafima Cassiano.

It was true, he knew, that Gabriel Andor was a bad father.

But perhaps that did not mean he was an entirely bad man.

“Maybe he will,” Cassian said.

He waited until Fima’s eyes had closed, and his breaths evened, before he got to his feet.

It was dark outside, and Cassian could see his dim reflection in the glass, the short hair, crooked nose, straight posture.

He swallowed, and nodded at it.

“Good night.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> HAHA. Okay.
> 
> Happy Father's Day U.S. kiddos! There's no excuse for this, but that is the explanation.
> 
> [Full disclosure: there's a good chance the timeline with the Nonsense is wonky here, but I am far too tired and lazy to go back and figure it out.]
> 
> Gabriel was always this unknown figure in the Nonsense, which was a series that argued (among other things) that Cassian was his mother's son. This was done largely in part to the fact STAR WARS tends to neglect stories about mothers and their children in favor of stories about fathers. It grew to become this argument about mental illness, and how it can be inherited, and the guilt this may create in parents, and the bitterness it may spawn in their children.
> 
> [See: UNCURLING LIFELINES, SHARE WITH ME THE SUN, BINARY STAR.]
> 
> [Italicized flashback from GRAY AREAS.]
> 
> But I was thinking about fathers, what with today's holiday. And ghosts. And the trauma of abandonment, and how Cassian will always live with it. The Nonsense was also about recovery, and I thought it may be nice to finally give Cassian a sense of closure about Gabriel (as he got with Serafima), but perhaps without unraveling the whole mystery. Gabriel is still unknown; but perhaps in one respect, that he regretted his choices in the end, can be revealed.
> 
> I think, for many of us; we need to hear that. <3
> 
> anyway, please drop a line. i am here and on tumblr. [theputterer there too.]


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